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Archive for July, 2015

The Jeremy Corbyn effect: ‘Jez we can’ – video

Friday, July 31st, 2015

From one of the summer’s big gatherings of the left, the Tolpuddle festival, to the streets of marginal Bedford and a big campaign rally in Luton, John Harris charts the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and his effect on politics. He finds a political world where everything is suddenly turned upside down, and where anything is possible Continue reading…

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What Jeremy Corbyn offers his supporters is clarity | John Harris

Thursday, July 30th, 2015

The under-30s are drawn to this Labour leadership contender by human factors: qualities that are as much about tone as content – and made a Tuesday night in Luton electric

Around once a year now, something bubbles to the surface that shows how broken mainstream politics has become. Sometimes these things endure; often they fizzle out. But from the brief season of Cleggmania, through the on-off rise of Ukip and the so-called “green surge”, to the great political reformation in Scotland, Britain is experiencing its own version of the tumult that has broken out all over Europe. A politics built around fortysomething career politicians and three parties that fixate on an illusory centre ground is in increasing trouble. Even if the Conservatives have enough support and strength of purpose to ride all this out (for now), the Labour establishment is being buffeted by winds that seem to grow more ferocious by the month.

Every anti-Corbyn intervention has only seemed to boost his support

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‘They want more than we did’ – how the Tories made age our biggest divide

Saturday, July 18th, 2015

The budget was hailed as a stroke of political genius – but its critics say it was a brazen defence of the old at the expense of the young. So are pensioners the only voters worth fighting for? And if so, what will become of their grandchildren?

It’s a Thursday morning in Christchurch, Dorset, and in its own way, the scene in the centre of town looks idyllic. The number of cafes – which include the obligatory Costa, and Caffe Nero – easily extends to double figures. In any city, they would be full of people barking out their orders and twitching their way to work, but here just about everyone takes their time. Breakfast might stretch to an hour; elevenses even longer. Meanwhile, as the sun beats down, other people idly sit on benches and at bus stops. Very quickly, you get the sense that being busy might easily strike some people as being tantamount to rudeness.

Christchurch has a population of 54,000 and sits at the heart of a parliamentary constituency with the same name. At the last count, the 33% of people here who are over 65 made it the constituency with the UK’s oldest age profile, a demographic quirk that hits you as soon as you arrive, not least on account of the number of bungalows. It is rock-solidly Tory: although the Lib Dems took it in a byelection at the fag-end of the John Major years, Christopher Chope now has a seemingly impregnable majority of 18,000 (with Ukip having recently leapfrogged the two other main parties into second).

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Who should Labour speak for now? | John Harris

Monday, July 13th, 2015

Labour 2020: In the first of a week-long series looking at the questions Labour will need to answer if it’s to win power at the next election, we begin with the state of the party itself – and who it is there to represent

For the past five years, I have spent a lot of time visiting Labour’s old heartlands. And in the south Welsh valleys, the English north-east and the central belt of Scotland, what has hit home time and again is people’s bafflement about what the Labour party actually is. Its older supporters seem to vote for it merely out of habit; those under 30 have absolutely no idea what is meant to distinguish Labour from its adversaries. In more marginal seats, moreover, mention of the party tends to prompt little more than sighs of indifference.

Right to its roots, Labour and the supposed “movement” some dreamy people still talk about seem to be rotting away. In the days after Margaret Thatcher died, I pitched up with my film-making Guardian colleague John Domokos in Merthyr Tydfil, where we spoke to an 18-year-old woman who couldn’t find a job. Domokos whispered: “Ask her if she knows what a trade union is.” I duly did. “No, I don’t,” she said. “What’s that?” Labour has endured crises, but this kind of profound estrangement is why its post-election troubles feel existential.

Outside the Westminster fishbowl, they seem cold and mechanistic, and devoid of any real sense of how people live

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The strange death of the Liberal Democrats

Monday, July 13th, 2015

The Lib Dems are hoping the announcement of their new leader this week will be the start of their fightback. But after an election in which they took just 8% of the vote, and even Vince Cable lost his seat, some insiders worry that voters have stopped listening. Is the malaise terminal?

Vince Cable has just hosted a farewell lunch for the former staff of his constituency office. “I’ve got quite a lot of things on the go,” he says. One is a sequel to his book The Storm, which was about the crash of 2007-8: the followup is somewhat imaginatively titled After the Storm, and is being readied for publication in mid-September. “And I’m taking my dancing quite seriously,” he adds, which means an inevitable mention of Strictly Come Dancing. In December 2010, he appeared on the show’s Christmas special, doing an admirable foxtrot alongside such celebs as June “Dot Cotton” Brown, and Fern Britton. So would he be up for being a proper contestant? “I haven’t been asked, but I could be,” he says, with a hint of his characteristic modesty.

So he is in the market? “I’m in the market … but they make their own choices.”

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